Maurice Collis

by Maurice Collis

Maurice Collis

Maurice Collis (1889-1975) was born in Dublin, graduated from Oxford, and joined the Indian Civil Service in Burma in 1912. While serving in Rangoon, Maurice Collis fell into official disfavor for fraternizing with the Burmese and Chinese residents, and was posted to the obscure port of Mergui. After his retirement in 1936, he wrote at least twenty historical books.

First published in 1946, Foreign Mud is a marvelous historical reconstruction of the events surrounding the illegal trade of opium in Canton during the 1830s and the ensuing Opium Wars between Britain and China. Based largely on the voluminous documents written by British doctors, missionaries, merchants, and government officials, Collis’s tale – far from being a dry assemblage of dates and facts – is a fascinating look at British imperialism. Shifting back and forth between the fiery debates in London and the confrontations on the China coast, his story recounts, in all its complexities, a moment in time when China is forced after more than two thousand years of self-contained sufficiency to open its doors to the culture, commerce, and evangelization of the West – the casus belli: the foreign mud, or opium, the Brish grew and shipped from India.…

The convergence of Cortés and Montezuma is the most emblematic event in the birth of what would come to be called “America.” Landing on the Mexican coast on the eve of Good Friday, 1519, Hernán Cortés felt himself the bearer of a divine burden to conquer and civilize the first advanced civilization Europeans had yet encountered in the West. For Montezuma, leader of the Mexicans, 1519 (known in their advanced astronomical system as “One Reed”) was the date of a dire prophesy: the return of Quetzalcoatl, a fearsome god predicted to arrive by ship, from the East, with light skin, a black beard, robed in black––exactly as Cortés would.…

She was indeed a Queen. Born a peasant in thirteenth-century Burma, Queen Saw––young, beautiful, and extremely intelligent––reigned beside two kings. Everything luxuriantly cruel or voluptuously lovely swirled around the royal White Umbrella: mandarins, oracle-eating tigers, murdersome intrigue, egg-sized emeralds, concubines, fearsome magic, Tartars, and groveling courtiers (with elbows calloused as thickly as the soles of their feet). Queen Saw happily survived all––her two husbands as well as the Mongol invasion. Wonderful in its details and historical lore, the chief enchantment of She Was a Queen is the storytelling style of Maurice Collis.…

A hybrid of history and biography, Maurice Collis’s The Land of the Great Image concerns a little-known Portuguese friar abroad in early seventeenth-century Asia. The book chronicles the great diplomatic coup of Friar Manrique’s career, opening the kingdom of Arakan, now Burma (land of the “great image” of the Buddha) to the Church and to Portuguese trade, Dispatched from Goa, capital of the now almost forgotten Portuguese empire in Asia, Manrique made his way across and around the Bay of Bengal, surviving shipwreck, tigers, and pirates, to reach the court of King Thiri-thu-dhamma.…

New Directions was founded in 1936, when James Laughlin (1914–1997), then a twenty-two-year-old Harvard sophomore, issued the first of the New Directions anthologies. “I asked Ezra Pound for ‘career advice,’” Laughlin recalled. “He had been seeing my poems for months and had ruled them hopeless. He urged me to finish Harvard and then do ‘something’ useful.”